God Subverting the Master Narrative: Term Paper

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Her marriage was not sanctified in a community church, and true to expectations, Domingo leaves Sofi soon afterward. But this is not viewed in the narrative construct or in Sofi's own eyes as a judgment by the divine of her bad decision-making. Conventional religion within the narrative frequently fails to save even worthy people, like the pious Felicia. The need for God is a palpable presence within the narrative on a popular level, but God promises no reward for moral behavior.

Later on, in Chapter 6, the reader will see the young Domingo through Sofi's eyes, although the reader knows what he will become. However, Sofi's life is never a tale of virtue rewarded or foolishness punished, and she always reacts to adverse circumstances with humor and empowering choices, as she decides to run for mayor, at one point, in flagrant opposition to her community's standards once again, just as she chose her husband against the advice of her family.

The sense that anything can happen is conveyed from the first moment of the novel when the dead infant La Loca speaks from her coffin after she is apparently resurrected. Loca refuses to marry for the rest of her life because of her hatred of people, and does not allow anyone to become close to her except Sofi. She dies at the end of the novel, but not because of any anticipated reason, rather she passes away from AIDS, a strange, seemingly impossible occurrence given her complete aversion to being touched by people at all. Moreover, despite some promising starts in life, Sofi's other daughters all meet with unhappiness in their romantic relationships.

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Their lives subvert conventional narrative or allegorical expectations, as Faith becomes obsessed with money and loses her husband, the hope of Esperanza's schooling and advancement turns to poisonous obsession with bad men, recreating her mother's own folly.

Caridad meets the cruelest fate of all, as she is raped and violently attacked. However, from the terrible evil that befalls the daughter Charity, Caridad gains the gift of prophesy that helps her see into the future to help her family, ultimately allowing her father win the lottery. The fates of the three sisters demonstrate that in the anti-logic of the novel. Tragedy occurs without warning, bad decisions are made by intelligent characters, and good things come from evil. The community, far from being wise and supportive in the face of such tragedies, engages in a kind of competition, forming, for example, an organization called MOMAS (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints) a self-help group for women who have also had miracles happen to their children like Sofi. Within the community, within the heart of the narrator, and the logic of the tale, there is no clear good and evil, despite the narrator's moralizing and the folkloric style and lack of psychological depth of the characters. But it is implied that this is perhaps the wisest and most paradoxically realistic element of the tale of all, directly contradicting all common assumptions of what a tale should be, and how a reader should judge a narrative's characters and narrative quality.

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"God Subverting The Master Narrative ", 01 March 2007, Accessed.18 May. 2024,
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/god-subverting-master-narrative-39693